


Variations on the Word Sleep

by blueincandescence



Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Backstory, Canon-Compliant, F/M, First Time, Introspective Steve, Missing Scenes, Societal norms and how to break them, Spoiler: Steve Trevor is a feminist, chapter 6 is explicit, chapters 1-5 are teen, sleep tropes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-11-08 10:27:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11079687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueincandescence/pseuds/blueincandescence
Summary: Five times Steve and Diana sleep together plus one time theysleep together. Title taken from the achingly good poem of the same name by Margaret Atwood.





	1. Lethe

Exhaustion is a weight on Steve pulling him down into the dark as sure as drowning. Still his mind fights to stay alert. He doesn’t know where he is, except that he is alone in unfriendly territory. That, at least, isn’t new.

He lays in a cushioned nest built into the bedrock of an island that doesn’t exist on any map he’s ever studied. And sometimes that feels like all he ever does, study maps. They change so often. A foot of ground given here, taken there. A thousand bodies in between. Madness.

He explained these and other horrors of the war to Queen Hippolyta of the Amazons for what felt like hours. 

Madness.

Steve huffs, throat constricting around patches made rough by salt water brine.

He should have died. He should have dragged that book of death with him to the bottom of the ocean. Mission accomplished. But here he is. A noise leaves his ragged throat, something like a laugh. Never tell him the odds. Steve Trevor is a survivor, that’s what people say about him. Not always in kindness.

Rock shifts rock. He rolls further toward the wall, evening his breathing in the semi-darkness. Steve hasn’t forgotten that she is there, exactly, he’s just so damned tired. He keeps his back to the wonder of a woman who plucked him out of the sea.

Diana, Princess of Themyscira, promised to watch over him. He was spared retribution for the invasion of her homeland but just barely. The heat of that confounded lash still chafes at his unbroken skin. When Diana told him of her plan to forgo sleep to watch over him, he asked why her people would betray the ruling of their queen. Brown eyes as deep and unfathomable as these caverns leveled on him. No, Diana explained, she had made her promise to ensure he would give them no just cause to.

It’s strange to feel so intently on the back of his neck the stare of a creature he isn’t quite convinced is real.

Waking up on the beach under her hand, alarm had given way to confusion and then to awe. For just a brief moment in his sinner’s life, he was certain the woman with the sun crowning her head was an angel. That he’d died and gone to paradise.

Then the beach lit up and his waking nightmare restarted. The illusion shattered.

He’s come from hell, so this must be purgatory. Maybe she is an angel. St. Peter in a leather skirt. Or King—What was it? He wracks his college-boy brain—Minister of Hades, King Minos. Maybe she's him in a guise meant to beguile him. Better suits the milieu.

Laughter barks out of him, the scrape of it in his throat mixing with the gravel under the princess's boot heels. He sucks in his breath while she moves behind him only to choke on it. Beneath his coughing fit is the sound of pouring water.

The princess comes to stand at his back. “This is the Draught of Hypnos. I have read that the Lasso of Hestia can be a shock to the mind the first time one feels its effects, especially if one is unaccustomed to—”

Diana stops short of calling him what he is, a habitual liar. Even someone as high-minded as she seems to be knows that the truth is a delicate weapon.

“Nevermind what I have read,” she says. “This will help you sleep.”

Sleep. Longing brings a damp prickle to his dry, aching eyes.

He holds his breath to steady himself but decides instead he cannot face her. He reaches his arm out behind him for a goblet to be fitted into his hand by warm, strong fingers.

“Drink,” she commands in a tone that might have been haughty were it not for a gentle concern.

He swallows the Draught of Hypnos, a water unlike any he has tasted. The name tugs at the back of his mind. Hypnos, keeper of the river Lethe. He took one mandatory classics course at the university. Strange he should suddenly remember with such clarity that lethe means forgetfulness.

Just as suddenly, he can think of little else besides the island. The blue of its calm waters. The abundance in its markets. Its pure, sweet air. Will he be cursed-blessed to stay here forever now? Six pomegranate seeds were enough to bind a goddess to the underworld. If Diana means to trick him into staying, who is he to resist her? His mission seems so unimportant now.

Water spills from the corners of his mouth as he greedily drinks down the last drops. Steve licks his already drying lips. Too soon, memory is threatening to take him. He holds the goblet to his chest and curls around it.

That's habit. You sleep small in the trenches. You hold tight to anything they haven’t stolen from you, any lifeline you can grasp. You sleep with one eye open, if you know what’s good for you. Steve used to think about what was good for him almost exclusively.

It’s funny, the way he’s finally succumbed to shellshock. He often wonders where those poor dumbstruck wretches go to when they stare out a thousand yards. Probably not to an island of warrior women untouched by war. The absurdity of this fantasy is his and his alone.

In the morning, he will find a reasonable explanation. He’ll decide he has stumbled onto a religious cult. Something like the Amish of Ancient Greece, women who follow the old ways and name all their queens after myths. Tomorrow he will remember that it's no good trying to live with himself if all he's living for is to be the last man standing. He'll think of letters from Colonel William S. Trevor piled high on his desk in London, each one a veritable treatise on honor. Tomorrow Steve will think of the mission.

Tonight exhaustion claims him. He forgets himself in the hysterical absurdity of it all. His shoulders convulse with a laughter he is too wrung-out to voice. A hand reaches out to steady him, and she shushes him like a child. Only then Steve realizes he is closer to weeping. But there’s joy in it.

As sure as the bright skies of Themyscira banished the fog from whence he came, the draught clears the fog from his mind. His muscles loosen, his head lolls back. He looks up to see Diana standing above him. Backlit by the strange blue glow, she is an angel with a furrowed brow.

He has a sleep-stretched smile for her. “‘At’s a helluva brew,” he slurs, eyes drifting closed on the answering tug of her lips.

“Sleep, soldier,” the angel commands.

Captain Steve Trevor, American misery profiteer turned flyboy cannon fodder turned double agent, obeys her. Diana’s hand remains an anchor on his shoulder as he sinks into oblivion. The weight and the warmth of her is more real to him than all the horrors that have kept him awake for four long years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The internet tells me the Lasso of Truth has negative consequences for those who shield the truth from themselves (even driving a character to suicide). The way Steve breaks down over the end of the world makes me think he has been avoiding thinking about the true scope of the horrors. *sob*


	2. Signals

Steve is glomming onto the fact that most conversations he’ll have with Diana won’t end until she serves up a one-two punch that knocks him speechless.

Beside him, the most beautiful woman in his world or hers nestles into a corner of the makeshift bed. Their makeshift bed. He stills as much as he can while she gets comfortable. After winding him with her outright dismissal of his entire sex, she had turned away. Case closed.

Nerves shot. His fingers are tight over his clenched stomach. He isn’t posturing, only deeply, privately mortified. It isn’t polite to assume, but there are such things as signals. He reads them for a living — literally, to stay alive. He’s never been so wrong. Even when he fell for the artist in Copenhagen with the long cigarette and longer legs, he knew from word one he didn’t stand a chance. No doubt Diana the Amazon can quote Sappho with equal passion.

A sleepy hum escapes her throat, and Steve twitches and tries not to think about the way her low, lilting voice turned the word _pleasure_ into onomatopoeia.

Great. Now he’s thinking like a poet. As signals go, unmistakably a dangerous one.

From flat on his back, Steve blinks up into the sky, hoping the stars might return his bearings. But they sparkle like the glowing waters in the cavern and the night is as dark as Diana’s eyes when they compelled him to stand with his arms stiff at his side. To let her gaze upon him — A man, the first she’s ever seen in the flesh and well above average.

That’s not ego talking. His body is his greatest weapon in this war, on the battlefield and off. Women are a fount of secrets. Clio to the contrary, he knows how to get them gushing. Steve cringes at himself, because that is his ego. The little part of him that all but whined in defense of his vigor before the better part of him buttoned his trap.

Since the stars aren’t helping, he closes his eyes. He can’t close his ears. Diana’s breathing is regular, like the lapping of the water at the bottom of their boat. It’s not long before his chest rises and falls to her rhythm.

When she shifts, leather creaks and immediately he is thinking of what she’s wearing — more to the point, what she’s not wearing — underneath her cloak. The fur brushes his wrist. He shivers. At least there’s a breeze to blame it on.

He’s pathetic, no doubt about it. But Steve finds the silver lining easily enough. It’s been ages since he’s been with a woman he hasn’t had a dossier on. It’s been almost as long since he’s wanted to be. His father warned him that war numbs a man, but how can Steve deny feeling around Diana? She radiates emotion. Joy, sorrow, interest, conviction. Benevolence. Were he made of clay, the power of her smile would be enough to bring him to life.

He opens his eyes and smiles faintly up at Greek-named constellations. He can’t figure her out.

Steve won’t try to deny the strangeness of Themyscira. He’s traveled everywhere he could rustle up a ticket. He’s never come up against magic he couldn’t see the wink in before.

That disconcerting truth aside, he’d be a lunatic to believe Diana’s stories of Zeus and Ares.

But he’d be a damn poor judge of character to not realize she believes them. And he’d be lying to himself if he said he didn’t want to believe in her.

Stop Ares and, poof, end the war — all war. Peace in the hearts of men forever.

God that sounds good.

The impossibility of it doesn’t sting as much as it might, because in his breast pocket is the next best thing: a real, tangible hope of stopping this war.

He slips his fingers inside to hold onto it, turning his chin toward Diana. She’s a mass of black hair and black fur. Even asleep in the night chill, she gives off warmth.

Maybe he doesn’t need to figure her out.

She saved his life, twice. She helped him down from the nightmares the Lasso drudged up, and she helped him escape the island. Between the two of them, she’s the stronger sailor by a nautical mile. With her intuiting currents and him on navigation, they might just make it to London in time to stop whatever horror show Dr. Poison has spelled out in her notes.

Not quite sword-and-shield heroics, but he’s not going to be the one to contradict Diana. As far as he’s concerned, the woman at his side has every right to feel like she’s setting off on a mission to save the world.

Steve doesn’t remember falling asleep with a smile curving his lips, but he half-wakes with his nose buried in fur and hair that smells of the island — fresh barley and sweet violets. He’s curled into the incredible heat of Diana’s back, his forehead bowed against her shoulder. One of his elbows rests where her cloak dips into her side. A pleasant arousal is spreading through him.

He inhales Diana along with the cool, salt air. Dawn light colors the back of his eyelids orange-yellow. The gentle rock of the boat reminds Steve that they are adrift in the wide-open sea. Tetherless. Weightless. Like his life before the war. No ration cards. No mud, no smoke. No mourning black.

He wants to sail the woman asleep under his arm to the Indian Ocean to show her the bright colors and scents of spice markets teeming with life. Shower her with silks and sapphires. He wants to taste her laugh.

A desperate ache stabs him in his hollow gut.

Steve jerks fully awake, sitting up to scrub at his face. The wind hits him and in the space of a breath he’s shivering.

Diana rolls over, propping herself on her elbow. Her stare is alert, making him squirm to wonder how long she let him lay with her like that. What she’s been thinking of.

As if in answer, she says, “It is good you slept with me.”

The morning husk in her voice has him drawing his knees up as a shield.

“Men do not run especially hot.”

Practical and insulting. He should be used to that by now.

“We shouldn’t — ” His voice croaks. With more authority, he tries, “We shouldn’t sleep together again.”

Diana’s brows lift, eyes drop.

He clears his dry throat, tries to mimic her flat logic. “If we want to make the best time, one of us should be ready to adjust course.”

She nods readily enough. "We must make haste to the war."

India floats away, always an impossible dream for so many reasons.

"Still, I doubt much time will be gained by sleeping in shifts." There's something reluctant about the way her nimble fingers pluck at their makeshift bed. 

The jump of hope Steve feels at this tiniest of signals is absurdly unwarranted. He knows that, just as sure as he knows he’s never going to be able to stop himself from searching her bottomless eyes for more signals.

But he can stop himself from acting on them. "Every second counts."

After all he’s sacrificed to transform himself into a better man, a man who _does something_ , to realize one peaceful night’s sleep with a woman he can’t even fathom is enough to make him want to turn his back —

 _Capricious_ , his father called him when he quit the army and went off to seek his fortunes abroad. In a rare instance of profanity, the Colonel followed that up with, _Damnably_ _distractible_.

Eyes carefully to himself, Steve gets up to consult his compass and his map to make sure they’re still on course.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know the movie makes it seem like they make it from the Mediterranean to London in one night. Even with a ride, that seems pretty far-fetched. Me, I'm going to console my shipper heart by pretending they were on the boat together for days getting to know each other.


	3. Intentions

Steve wants nothing more than to crawl into the giant four poster bed behind him and forget those last few whiskeys he had at the bar. But he rubs the blur from his eyes again before starting on his second letter home.

 _Dearest Mother,_ he writes by candlelight. _Your only son is very much alive. Count as truth any glowing notes regarding my bravery, valor, etcetera. Otherwise, disregard all recent communications from the United States government. The men put in charge of our fates and fortunes have been proved wrong again._

He can well imagine Mrs. E. Louise Trevor née Rockwell, chapter vice president of the Oklahoma Women's Christian Temperance Union, compressing a smirk in the midst of her righteous fury. He tries to think of how he'll word a line to persuade her not to picket the War Office on his behalf.

Instead, his tired mind wanders to the status of his belongings. His mother is a practical woman above all else. By now, the majority of his carefully curated possessions have been shipped home and given away to one charity or another.

He wonders what small thing his mother might have set aside to remember him by. With Trudy, who succumbed to a fever even their mother’s iron will could not break, it was her prized horse saddle. A bit of christening lace was all Steve has ever known of the eldest of his six sisters, Elizabeth. Steve hopes his mother kept his oversized trunk, battered and bullet-ridden and covered in postage marks.

The trunk appeared on his bed the morning he left his father's house — no longer a soldier, not yet a man. No note attached. Was it a peace offering to a soon-to-be prodigal son? Was it a gesture of love from a mother whose small smiles he chased every day as a boy? Or a parting gift from his four living sisters, who spoiled him as often as they tormented him?

Steve rests his chin on the hand that holds his safety pen. He pictures the sole hill on the Trevor family farm and the small cemetery that tops it. Is he buried there? An empty box and a headstone. Laid to rest beside a cousin who died face-down in the trenches. Daniel Trevor left behind a wife and a son and a life that Steve knows nothing about. A life he never wanted for himself until the war shoved it violently out of reach.

Something of the panic Steve felt with the lasso hot around his wrist rises up in him. He thinks of an empty coffin unearthed to fill. Of a headstone with a new date chiseled in. He imagines his mother reading this letter then receiving a telegram that would turn his temporary resurrection into a cruel farce.

He imagines a very different mother. The queen of an island that has only known peace, who let her daughter sail away with the man who brought war to its shores. However strange and marvelous her people, they are not immune to bullets. There would be no telegram for Queen Hippolyta if Steve leads her daughter into death.

He crumples the unfinished letter between his fists.

As a balm for his dark thoughts, Steve reaches over a candle for a last bit of sweet pastry. For as long as he's known her, Etta has guarded the secret of her wartime baking prowess. Confections are her weapon of choice when delivering bad news. He'd been looking forward to sleeping between his own Egyptian cotton sheets, but, whoopsie daisy, his bed now belongs to his successor, who Etta guessed likely kept the sheets if they're as nice as Steve always went on about.

The pastries had softened the blow of being homeless and given up for dead. Or maybe what did it was the delight that lit Diana's face when she bit into the flaky crust and tasted the spiced apples inside. Her half of the pastries had consumed her curiosity enough that Etta was able to steer her into a hotel room with barely a wave goodnight.

At least that meant Steve’s pang of disappointment at being so easily forgotten was a private moment. He could watch the door close softly behind Diana and make the admittedly tipsy walk down the hall to his own impersonal room in peace. Steve always did find it hard to deny Charlie’s pleas for another round the night before a mission that could get them killed.

Licking his index finger, Steve catches pastry crumbs from the plate. He pulls out a fresh sheet of paper, drums his pen on the desk, and tries to come up with a better opening salvo than, _Brace up, Mother, dear, I might still be dead when you read this._

His letter to his father had flowed easier. News of the war. Oblique references to past and future missions. A reaffirmation of his promise to comport himself with the honor of a soldier — while the truth of his identity as a spy remains one more unspoken rift between them.

A knock, soft but insistent, is enough to start Steve out of a doze. He swipes at his face to better see his watch, only to realize that safety or no safety his pen has left a smear of ink on his cheek. The knock grows louder.

Rubbing the ink with the thin sleeve of his half-buttoned long johns, Steve stumbles to the door. Charlie was passed out when they left the bar, so this must be Sameer, wide awake with a bottle of port and a demand to know more about Diana.

Prepared to wave him off — prepared with a gun on a table in reach if the bad guy convention has reconvened — Steve opens the door on the woman herself. His protests die on pursed lips. All he can do is take Diana in.

The nightgown she chose and he paid for is blush rose silk and cinched at the waist by a matching robe. Her dark hair is tucked into an elegant braid that winds from her crown to slip past her shoulders. A foreign princess calling on a farm boy. Regal accent doing little to break the spell, she says, “Hello, Steve,” and steps toward him.

He holds the door between them, trying not to think of how foolish he must look cowering behind it. “Wh-what are you doing up? It’s, uh, it’s late.”

Her eyes widen as she takes on the feigned ambivalence that goaded him into sleeping beside her their first night on the boat. “Oh. I must have woken you. I can go.”

Steve is drudging up the mental fortitude to tell her that would be best when a chime sounds at the end of the hall. He opens the door wide. “Please, come in.”

Despite his impatient gesture, Diana hesitates. “I’ve already disturbed you.”

He holds back a snort of agreement. “So you might as well come in.”

Three men in top hats emerge from the elevator. The eldest of them harrumphs at the scene they make, the pair of them a burlesque tableau. This is emphatically not that kind of hotel. “Blind sister,” Steve offers weakly, giving up gallantry to pull Diana into his room with a hand briefly on her elbow and, Lord help him, her waist.

He shuts the door behind them, forehead resting briefly against it as he steadies himself with a sigh. Never in his life has he done so much lecturing. The hypocrisy must be enough to make Trudy, God rest her, turn in her grave. “Diana — ”

“They disapproved.” There is an edge to her flat tone.

Being on the receiving end of a lecture is worse, Steve reminds himself. “It’s not your fault.”

“Of course it’s not my fault. I’ve respected your culture’s need to cover — I am covering the same amount of skin I covered all day.”

A smile twitches at the corner of his lips. Steve has no choice but to turn so he’s leaning against the door. She’s got her hands on her hips. Indignation suits her as well as any emotion she’s graced him with. Underneath that is her ever-present curiosity.

“It’s — it’s about expectation. You’re wearing bed clothes.” Lingerie, if he’s being specific. But, given how thin the cotton of his long johns are he really, really wants to avoid specifics. “So, people think of — well, of bed.”

She quirks a fine brow.

A different tack: “There are public clothes and private clothes. Private clothes in public spaces give people the — the wrong idea.” He should stop there, but his mouth runs away from him. “That — that you were interested in...in, you know. Like you said.” He really should shut up. Almost wincing, he finishes, “Pleasures of the flesh.”

Both brows are up now, quizzical. A smile pulls at her lips. “Why would I not be interested in pleasures of the flesh?”

His throat catches on his mother’s religion, but the purity of her expression makes him rethink, breathe easy. Why wouldn’t she be? He wants nothing but pleasures for her.

A smile flits across his face, then fades. “The problem is — ” The problem is him. The way he can’t stop darting glances at the scooped neckline of her nightgown. The way his tongue thickens in his mouth when her gaze lingers on him. He clears his throat. “The problem is they’d think you were interested in their pleasure.”

"Just from my attire? When we have exchanged no clear invitations?"

"Uh-huh."

Still unable to accept this, Diana counters, “You said it was not polite to assume outside of marriage.”  _You mean you lied?_ echoes behind her words.

He bristles. “I never said all men were polite, did I?” He jabs a finger toward her. “You assumed.”

“How could I have thought otherwise?” She jabs a finger right back at him. “I only had you as an example.”

Steve stops short. Was that? He searches her flustered expression. It was. The back of his neck heats. He wants to enjoy the compliment, only how can he? Steve may never assume, but is it all that different to hope? Yearn might be a better word. Burn, pine, perish. “Listen, you’re right about this whole thing,” he tells her. “It’s absurd. I know that. Lots of people do. It’s just — it’s society. It’s hard to go against it.”

Her arms fold. “Then it must be what Etta warned me about.”

“What’s that?”

Dark eyes narrow. “The patriarchy.”

His instinct is to grin at her ferocity, but he sobers to realize how strange this must be for her. How many times since she stepped foot in London has Diana been insulted and ignored because of her sex? The fact that he could make light of it is one more reason she has to mistrust him. To get away from her look, so reminiscent of their confrontation on the steps, Steve moves from the door. “You needed something? I assume Etta went home.”

“Some time ago,” Diana confirms. She wanders to the other side of the room, mercifully not looking at him as he tries to figure out how to stand with dignity in his underclothes. “I like her very much. But it is somewhat difficult to have a conversation with her. She misconstrues.”

At that, Steve does laugh. “Etta builds the world she wants to live in.”

Diana turns from inspecting the gold leaf of the wallpaper to tell him, “She is under the impression that an Amazon is a ‘militant suffragette.’”

“That’s what the newspapers call them. Warrior women battling for the vote. It’s a tribute.”

Diana hums, moving on from the wallpaper to a painting of women walking along the Thames carrying parasols. “My mother told me when she was young women could not vote in the world of men. Many were slaves, like my people.”

Sighing, he offers, “Not a lot of change for a couple thousand years, I guess.” Even as he says it, he wonders why her mother would tell her such outlandish stories. Probably to escape a disappointing reality.

“What do I know of change?” Diana asks, wistful. It’s the closest thing he’s heard to a criticism of her paradise homeland. She inspects the light switch, turning it on.

Steve winces at the artificial brightness. She flicks the switch off and on and off again. Steve is arrested by the way the light moves on the planes of her face. Diana’s stare is more intense, like she’s trying to find the right angle to see through to his soul.

He’s the first to drop his gaze.

“This is a great accomplishment,” she acknowledges, voice even. She turns off the light for the final time. “But firelight is more pleasing.”

“Yeah.” That’s all he’s got besides the pounding in his chest and the knot in his gut. He wets his dry lips so he can manage something blasé. “So. You’re here. We’ve determined men are awful. You’ve tested the electricity. What else can I do for you?”

She blinks at him. “Nothing.”

It’s the answer he dreaded. Yet, somehow it puts his world back on kilter. What could the princess want with the farm boy? _Nothing_ makes sense. He’s grateful to be remembered, but he’d be better off if he weren’t.

They have a mission. She’s an asset to it, which makes him her handler.

“It’s late,” Steve tries. “Couldn’t you sleep?”

She fiddles with the ties on her robe. “It has been a…” She lifts her chin up, defiant. “Challenging day.”

Steve’s chest constricts — in sympathy, he tells himself. He walks over to the end of the bed and lets his weight sink. “Let’s talk about it,” he suggests.

“You’re tired,” she demurs.

“It’s been a challenging day,” he repeats. But he pats the mattress next to him.

Diana fusses with smoothing her nightgown before settling in beside him. After a long moment, during which his eyes begin to ache again, she says, “You told your compatriots we would meet at the train station tomorrow afternoon.”

“There aren’t any earlier trains to the war,” he assures her.

With a smile, she says, “You’re keeping your promise, Steve Trevor.”

Steve tries to shrug off the pang of being insulted so soon after praise but fails. “I don’t always lie, you know.”

“I didn’t mean offense.” Genuine regret warms her voice. “I can see now with so many under Ares’ influence — even on your own side — that you are compelled to lie in order to do the honorable thing. That is a very difficult position. But your intentions are pure.”

God of War notwithstanding, how is it that Diana can come to understand what he does better than his own father?

She rests a hand on his knee. “I am sorry for doubting you.”

Steve meets her gaze, though he finds himself squinting to look at her. “God, you’re kind.” He means beautiful, unbelievable, a thousand miles above him. But kindness is what the war took from him first.

Diana’s fingers twitch, press into taut muscle with a strength that shouldn’t surprise him after what he’s seen her do. His name is all she says. Under the heat of her touch, now almost a massage, his thigh burns.

Not quite an invitation. An overture. In the depths of her eyes, he recognizes a kindling.

He longs to gentle her onto the bed and melt over her candlelit skin. But he is frozen with worry over the precarious nature of small flames. The slightest breath could snuff them out. A thoughtless shift could knock them over, set the place ablaze. Diana could turn him to ash if she wanted. If he isn't careful.

Steve drops his chin and rubs his palms into his eyes, bringing his elbows up as a prop.

Diana slides away. “You are tired,” she confirms. Then, teasing: “That’s your own fault for not waking me for my shift.”

He nudges her with his shoulder, and the two of them are back on the boat. Nowhere to go without bumping into each other. Nothing to do but talk or share silence. They do the latter for a spell he breaks with a jaw-cracking yawn.

“Come.”

He’s pulled to his feet by strong hands on his biceps and guided around to the side of the bed. Diana pulls back the bed sheets and brings them up to his chin when he’s settled, the way his sisters sometimes did to test out their maternal instincts.

“Did your mother tuck you in?” he asks. From what Diana has told him about her, he thinks she must have.

The confirmation is in Diana’s smile. “I resisted, of course. I wanted to stay awake forever listening to her stories.” She perches on the mattress. “Would you like to hear one?”

Warm and comfortable, Steve fights to keep his eyes on Diana’s glowing face. “About war?” He’d rather not.

“We weren’t always warrior women. The Amazons were created by Zeus to bring peace back into the hearts of mankind.”

“You’d be good at that,” he murmurs.

“Now you are lying to be kind. Etta all but threatened to strangle me several times today.” Diana’s grin is sweeter than pastries.

He returns it, unable to keep his eyes open any longer.

She rewards him with a hand on his cheek. She wipes at it with her thumb.

“Ink,” he tells her, remembering. “I was writing home.”

“What were you writing about?” Off his noncommittal noise, her stroking thumb becomes soothing. “The lasso made you think of death again.”

The speed of her guess uncovers another of his hollow yearnings. Maybe she couldn’t sleep for worrying about him. He lays his hand on her wrist. “I’m keeping my promise, Diana. But I don’t want to take you to the war. If you think London is hideous…” He can’t joke about it properly. Her wrist is delicate for all her power.

“It’s our duty, Steve Trevor.”

He lets go and rolls onto his back, forgoing her touch once more. “We won’t make it to the war if Etta catches you in here in the morning,” he warns. “I won’t, anyway.”

“I’ll go, then.” The mattress shifts as Diana stands. “To protect your honor.”

A grateful laugh huffs out of him. From behind his lids, he can tell each candle she blows out. “I know what I’ll write about,” he murmurs in the dark, almost hoping she won’t hear.

“Think about it in the morning,” she tells him, door creaking open. “Goodnight.”

He’s composing the letter as he dozes off. He will write to his mother that he has met a true Amazon. That she saved his life, however long it may last him. That he’s half-in love already.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so —
> 
> #1: SO SORRY about the length between updates. I was traveling and only had my iPad, other excuses, etc. This chapter is more than twice the length of the previous chapters combined so...mea culpa. 
> 
> #2: BIG, GIANT THANK YOU to my _amazingly_ talented and thorough beta, duchamp (highsmith on tumblr)!!!! Go read/re-read all her stuff now. Go now.
> 
> #3: I am unashamed to say comments give me LIFE. _Thank you_ for taking the time!  <3


	4. Epizelus

Steve half-wakes to shivers. The campfire has died down to embers and wind whistles through the threadbare blanket he’s curled himself into. His thick sweater and leather short coat feel like they’re made of cheesecloth. He tells himself he’s slept through much worse. It’s his bladder that finally prods him to get to his feet.

From where she’s buried underneath his flight jacket, Diana looks up at him. With so little light to reflect, her wide eyes seem empty. 

To the best of his miming ability, Steve tries to reassure her. He mutters about nature calling and staggers into the brush to relieve himself. When his wits have blinked back into focus, he spots Charlie a few yards away in silhouette. He holds his gun upright and at the ready. A dull pity rings through Steve. The echo of it follows him back to what is left of the campfire. Sameer and Chief are both asleep. Diana sits stock-still in the same position she was in when he laid back down what must have been hours ago.

Steve busies himself stoking the fire. His front is warmed by a lick of reawakened flames. But his back is chilled by her silence. “Diana,” he says just above a whisper. “You should get some rest.”

“I will keep watch.” The husk of her voice is a harsh rasp. 

Steve sighs. Lets the stick he was using fall into the fire. “Charlie is. He won’t sleep.” 

“Then how can I?”

He turns to look at her. Flickering light hollows out her cheekbones, the set sweep of her jaw. It’s a dim approximation of the ferocity he’s gotten used to seeing in her. Her stare is focused on the fire, and Steve thinks he can picture what she sees.

The disfigured soldiers on the bridge were just the beginning. The refugee families hit her even harder, he watched it happen. She hugged that little girl wailing for her mother and clinging to her skirts until a nurse peeled her out of Diana’s arms. The encampment was worse. The men who invaded her homeland didn’t scream as they died. They didn’t speak to her in a dozen languages — gibberish to Steve and most of the British medical support. Diana listened to every last word. He never asked her what they said. She is braver than he is in so many ways.

“Today was hard,” he says.

It didn’t start out that way. He introduced her to three kinds of breakfast, the best meal of the day. They played tourist all morning. He took her to every non-hideous place London has to offer — Big Ben, Buckingham Palace. She liked Hyde Park, the flowers and the children most of all. He wanted her to know there were things in his world to be delighted by. Before she saw the war.

Deep breath and he continues, “Tomorrow will be worse.” The least he can give her is honesty, even if it makes her flinch. “The best we can do for Charlie is to be rested because he won’t be.”

She hardly blinks. “I have read about men like Charlie. Herodotus wrote of an Athenian soldier, Epizelus. He was blinded during a battle in which no injury befell him. He witnessed his brother-in-arms killed, but he was spared. After this, Epizelus lost his sight.”

The spectral image of Daniel taking his last heaving breaths in the mud visits Steve once more. Danny was the younger cousin. The one with so much more to live for. A pastor’s voice, long forgotten, rings in Steve’s ears: _There but for the grace of God go I._

Steve toes dirt into the fire to clear his head. “We need to sleep. Come on, it’s freezing.” He scans around to answer the unspoken question of where she can sleep. A lack of blankets, among too many basic items to count, has plagued this war. Weighing Diana's ease with companionable touch against any commentary they might be subject to in the morning, Steve stretches back out on the hard ground. Her eyes follow him there. He makes a show of clearing away some rocks from the place beside him to give her plenty of time to take exception. Hearing none, he pronounces, “There. Practically the Ritz,” and holds the blanket open for her.

She goes back to ignoring him.

He props himself on his elbow. Still trying to pitch his voice low, he says, “Diana, please. Come rest.”

“I am not tired.” If it were anyone else, she’d sound petulant. Hell, he’d prefer it to the flat nothing she’s giving off. Fingers clenched down on the fabric of his flight jacket, Diana intones, “Nor am I cold.”

“Well, I am,” he says, letting exasperation edge his tone. “You took my jacket.”

She points her stubbornest chin at him. For a split second, he thinks she might fling the jacket she never asked for back at him. He likes the picture and another one it conjures — Diana in her youth, throwing tantrums befitting a warrior princess. His lips spread in a grin meant to be irritating.

Her brows slice in, but she catches on quick. She shakes her head, lips pursed. Standing up from the log, she takes the few steps over to him. The look she has him fixed with is strikingly reminiscent of Etta’s muttered use of _men_ as an epithet.

Steve budges over, holding the thin blanket open for her. She sits and flaps out his jacket over him. He’s prepared for her to lay down on her back, though under pain of lasso he’d have to confess how much he would prefer to fall asleep with the weight and warmth of her cradled in his arms. He gleans from the way Diana rearranges the cover and rolls her hips toward him that she’s thinking along the same lines but in a different order. “Oh.” Uncertain, Steve mimes shifting the other way. “You want me to — ”

“You are the one who is cold, are you not?”

“Uh.” He can’t think of a reason to object to her logic that wouldn’t sound like pure male ego, so he turns onto his side. “Good point.”

In a moment, the long line of her armored body is flush against his back. Her knees notch behind his with an ease that catches in his stomach. Her thighs are soft, her shin guards hard where they press into his calves. She wears plated leather underneath her dress with more ease than a Parisian fashionista might wear the finest whalebone corset. Diana takes her time figuring out what to do with her arms. Steve doesn’t twitch a muscle to distract her, even when she elbows him between his shoulder blades. Her trouble seems to be with the square breadth of his torso. Eventually, she snakes one arm under his and leaves it to rest propped on his side. And — huh. It’s an odd sensation to be not quite held like this. He feels her along his back, but it’s his chest that’s heavy.

“Are you…” Diana spreads her trapped hand where she elbowed him, fingers curling into his sweater. “Warm?”

He manages, “Mm-hm.” Then, worried she might find a reason to shift away, he asks, “Are you? Er, comfortable, I mean?”

Her body relaxes against his by fractions. “My shield-sisters and I often slept all together like this for companionship after long days of training.”

Steve remembers his first real battle, twenty-three and far from home. West Point filled his head with ideals and strategies and accolades. It never taught him how to fall asleep amid the stink of blood and sweat and fear. He lay awake in a flooded rice paddie, back-to-back with another survivor whose name he can’t recall. They didn’t speak for twenty-seven hours waiting out the Moro sniper until exhaustion took them all. “Yeah,” he responds to Diana. “Soldiers do that.”

After a long moment filled by the distant crack of ammunition, Diana says, “My shield-sisters are soldiers. They fought against oppression. As a child, I listened to their stories, and I — ”

Steve turns his head back but can’t catch a glimpse of her.

Her forehead bows against his covered neck. Shame laces her words: “I hoped for war.”

Before he can think better of it, his hand settles on top of hers. “I was the same as a kid,” he murmurs. “I spent hours polishing my father’s medals.” Steve can feel the misplaced pride even now. “When we’re kids, you know, we all play war.” Cowboys and Indians. _Bang, bang, you’re dead!_ Hell of a game. His father, on rest and recovery from Wounded Knee, caught Steve standing on top of his cousin-as-Sitting-Bull, crowing victory for Uncle Sam. The Colonel took a switch to his backside. No sitting for days. “Kids don’t know any better.” He squeezes her hand.

She squeezes back, clings. “My mother schooled this foolishness out of me. I read all the accounts. The violence...What I pictured in my mind was enough to make me treasure peace.” Artillery cracks through the night, and she shudders against him. “I could never have imagined — ”

The break in her voice almost does him in. He clamps down hard on his muscles to stay still. What’s he after doing? Flipping her over his shoulder and carrying her back to paradise? He wouldn't get three steps. She hasn’t asked to go home. Never would, he’d wager as a betting man. And he needs her on this mission. The alleyway, the bar — she’s proved herself the best fighter out of all of them. “We’re going to stop the war.” It’s his own mantra, the last bit of comfort he has.

Her nod is not as convincing paired with her worry: “The wounded will remain. And the ones who are like Epizelus. And the motherless children. The childless mothers.” Her splash of tears on the back of his head pricks his own eyes. “And you.” Diana’s head lifts. Her hand follows. Deliberate and sure, she strokes his nape. “Full of life. Yet you carry death with you.”

The urge to fling away from her touch rises up so quick Steve chokes tamping it down. Beneath hers, his hand numbs. _He doesn’t mean anything by it_ , he told her when Charlie bit back at her compassion, rabid. But Steve knows exactly what he meant by it. There is a hole inside him. To look up at such a light is to know how deep it goes.

Diana gentles her touch like he’s a skittish horse. “It will be more bearable,” she promises, “once Ares is defeated.”

His teeth grind down on a sneer he won’t be able to take back — _Save the fairy tales, princess_.

He hates himself as soon as he thinks it. Diana has seen the horrors men inflict on themselves first-hand and still she can’t bring herself to lay blame on the suffering. Steve doesn’t believe he has ever been as purely good as she is. Not before the war, not even as a child. There’s always been something twisting his liar’s tongue. A part of him would give anything to believe what she does. A part of him would give even more to never let her find out how wrong she is.

The rest of him closes his eyes on everything but the delicate scrape of her fingernails through his hair, over his gooseflesh skin. He shivers. Diana winds the arm resting on his side around to his chest and holds their hands there. Her even breaths heat his collar and everywhere underneath.

Steve takes in as much of her as he can stand. Then, slowly, he disentangles them to get to his feet. Tells her he’s going to check on Charlie.

When she hands him his jacket, her eyes glimmer with mute sympathy.

It’s a hardship to leave Diana alone beside the light of the fire to sleep in the brush. But Steve knows when you’re this cold lying down in a warm spot is risking never getting up again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my — dare I say? — _wonderful_ beta, duchamp! She makes my paragraphs flow so much better. And gives so much encouragement when I think my writing is taking a slow, meandering trip to nowhere.
> 
> And THANK YOU to everyone who has reviewed! I've honestly never had so many people read, kudos, or comment on my work. It makes me so happy! And a little intimidated. I hope you all continue to enjoy this!
> 
> _History corner:_
> 
> The story of Epizelus as accounted by Herodotus in his _Histories_ is often used by historians to demonstrate that the concept of PTSD has been around since antiquity. 
> 
> The Philippine–American War was over by 1902, but US troops occupied the area and fought the Moro Rebellion until 1913. The Battle of Siranaya happened in October of 1905. The US commander in charge was officially reprimanded for his use of excessive force against the Moros (the Muslim population of the Philippines). In my headcanon, Steve only lasts two years as a military officer abroad and in the US under such brutal, imperialistic conditions. 
> 
> The Wounded Knee Massacre was a slaughtering of 150 Lakota men, women, and children by the US military in 1890. The massacre took place just a couple weeks after Chief Sitting Bull, famous even at the time, was killed at Standing Rock.


	5. Believer

Showered and shaved and still alive, Steve sinks into a sofa. His head rings from the shelling and the blow he took from the butt of a gun. His joints ache and his bones are heavy. But noticing how similar the hutch across the room is to the one his grandmother Rockwell owned is enough to pull his lips into a smile. The sensation of a crippling weight lifted is a curious thing.

The innkeeper, thin and gray, hums a jaunty tune as she plops four sugars into his tea. He can see that the deep lines on her face weren’t all born of hardship. Her grin crinkles when she tells him in Flemish-accented French that she’d hidden all the sweets from the occupiers. Strange to think the last man to hold court in the inn's sitting room was a German commander, now a POW. Strange, too, that the last time Madame Maes delivered a tray of tea and biscuits, she'd considered herself a slave. When Steve insisted on paying for their rooms, she collapsed into tears.

Madame Maes beams as she promises that his clothing will be washed and pressed by dinner time. She approaches the table in the center of the room, every inch of it covered in leather and metal. Steve finds the energy to sit up straighter. He relaxes when he sees the reverence with which she trails a frail hand along the handle of Diana’s shield. Madame Maes had been the one to spread the pieces of Diana’s armor, cleaned of mud, evenly across the table. Steve had just appointed himself their guardian. From the deep pockets of her apron, Madame Maes takes out an elegant polishing kit and sets it gently on the table. “Pour l'ange,” she tells him, watery eyes twinkling, and leaves to busy herself elsewhere.

His thanks fades into the soft sounds of an empty, comfortable room — the hum of a coal-burning stove, muffled exuberance behind closed windows, and the chime of a grandfather clock, perfectly in time with the watch ticking against his pulse.

The force of the breath Steve lets out tips his head forward. A patch of sun warms the back of his neck. He remembers the sky was heavy and gray before Diana stepped out of the rubble of the church tower. The sun had appeared right at that moment, Steve is sure. Rays silhouetted Diana’s frame and poured between her fingers and haloed her crown. On his knees and squinting, Steve was caught halfway between the urge to bow his head and an aching need to see that light.

He’s daydreaming about the way water can play on sunlight, how a drowning man can’t help but put wings on a savior when muffled creaks send his head swiveling to the door.

The air shifts to accommodate Diana. She is tall even in her bare feet and slender under a shapeless dress. Dark, damp hair curls around a face that is no less angelic for how human she is standing in a room like so many he's called home. “Did I wake you?” she asks.

Steve shakes his head. He’s afraid his voice will give away his thoughts. Though he no longer counts himself among the believers, he was raised with a Methodism that taught true devotion is a private thing.

Diana, soft and scrubbed clean, smiles into his eyes. The rose scent of the inn’s soap wafts with her movement toward the table between them. As her gaze drifts downward, amusement quirks her brow.

Ducking his chin, Steve has to chuckle at the expanse of white shin exposed by his borrowed trousers. They’d played a game of _Goldilocks and the Three Bears_ trying to get him temporarily clothed, but they hadn’t managed it just right. By contrast, the undershirt is so oversized when he holds out his arms the material doesn’t come close to touching his sides.

At his demonstration, Diana grins and curtsies in sympathy. When she lets go, her hem falls mid-calf. She steps over to the table, picks up the polishing kit, and considers which piece of armor to start with first. She chooses a bracer. Her forearms, paler than her biceps, flex as she rubs clear polish into its metal.

All the Amazons Steve saw as he was led up the winding roads of the town wore bracers, not just the warriors who shackled and escorted him. He wonders what occasions call for their removal. His first guess has him thinking he should avert his eyes, but he is not a good enough man to do so without being asked. Diana’s hair slips over her shoulder, and his fingers twitch to tuck it back for her.

First one bracer polished then onto the next. She’s quick with this routine but no less thorough than he was taught to be when caring for his rifle. A good soldier is more than the weapons he carries, the Colonel explained, but only a fool neglects what stands between himself and death. Is that a concern of Diana’s? Until hours ago, Steve assumed that it was. He screamed her name out of abject fear for her life, and she answered him with a miracle. Even the memory of her stride across the battlefield raises the hairs on his arms. Ethereal, powerful.

Annoyed. “You stare.”

His slack jaw clicks shut. He clears his throat. “I — sorry. I was admiring — ” Off his unfortunate word choice, Diana’s eyes widen. His own dart to the shin guard she holds. “Your, uh, boots,” he finishes, and her eyes slant to the side. Steve reaches for his forgotten tea, anything. “You don’t see craftsmanship like that every day.” Before he can add, _No, siree,_ like a chump, he takes a gulp of tea. Cold. Semi-dissolved sugar coats his tongue, and it’s a Herculean effort not to do a spit-take.

“Caliga,” Diana corrects, polishing the foot portion of her second shoe. She moves on to the shin guard. “Greave.” Though skepticism threads her tone, pride seems to compel her to elaborate. “This is the finest Amazonian armor ever forged. Before Ares banished them to Tartarus, the gods gave my people many gifts.” Her hand rests on the lasso, lighting it up for a moment, and Steve finds his knee-jerk denial of all things mystical slow to rise. He supposes Diana has been inoculating him to divinity from the moment he opened his eyes to her. Her hand slips over the bodice of her armor. “Hephaestus himself tutored my foremothers. This represents a millennium of perfecting his trade. Leather pleated so expertly it can deflect the thrust of a sword.”

“And the top bit there?” Steve asks, gesturing to his own chest. He figures it’s polite to inquire since it’s not actually on her at the moment.

“It is the Aetos Dios.” Still polishing, she looks at him strangely when he doesn’t nod. He seems to have left his uncanny knack for Greek mythology behind on Paradise Island along with his grip on the rational world. Not knowing he’s a lost cause, Diana prompts, “The golden eagle of Gaea.”

Steve snaps his fingers, too little too late. “Earth goddess.”

“Ancestral mother of all life,” Diana clarifies. “Zeus understood the Aetos Dios as an omen of victory and made her his emblem.”

“Neat,” he says, and means it. Before the war, he traveled around Greece and Turkey. The ruins were spectacular. He wants to recommend them to her, to offer himself as a tour guide when the war is over. But over has too many meanings, variables. Worst case scenarios. He thinks, too, of asking her if she is homesick. Only he was raised better than to put his foot in his mouth that far. His mother’s advice: _Sometimes silence is best for the soul._ He has a biscuit and lets cushions soothe the ache from a half-night’s sleep on hard ground.

Finished polishing the eagle detailing, Diana checks her sword for any spots she might have missed. The sword she had cleaned and cared for before she would agree to do anything else. It was a surprisingly bloodless affair given all she accomplished with it. She turns it in the light. “This you already know the story of. The Godkiller.” She gentles it down and reaches over to pick up her tiara. “This you might recognize. It belonged to the greatest general in our history.” She buffs it with cloth and polish so that the eight-pointed star all but sparkles. When finished, she turns an equally brilliant smile on Steve. “You honored her in battle today.” She might as well have reached into his chest and squeezed.

“That was my honor,” he manages, grateful it had worked. Grateful she’d proved him so, so wrong. He chews on his lip, his mother’s advice regarding silence. Even though it’s a painful subject, somehow he thinks she wouldn’t mind him saying, “Your aunt would have been very proud of you.”

Diana’s fingers tighten on the tiara. She nods once. Her eyes cast about for more to do, but she has completed her task. She places the tiara on the table then reassembles the polishing kit.

In the time she takes, Steve finds his eyelids becoming heavier. It’s through his lashes that he watches her approach the sofa.

She chooses not to sit so much as lounge on the other end, fist propping her head. He’s sure he’s seen something similar etched in bronze. On a sleepy, sheepish grin, he asks her, “Did your foremothers learn the, ah, art of the repose from Aphrodite?”

Diana tosses her hair and affects an expression so beguilingly disinterested he almost bursts into sonnets on the spot. Steve snorts instead, and she laughs at the sound.

But it isn’t long before her face settles into something more serious, though no less open. “Ask your question, Steve.”

“Which one?” _How are you so beautiful?_ comes to mind. _What could we have possibly done to deserve you?_

“From when you stared.”

Steve turns a degree toward her. He could deflect again. He’s good at deflection. For her he tries to articulate it. “How did you — ” Not a useful question, so he rephrases: “Did you know you could do that?”

Her lower jaw shifts to the side as she considers. “The villagers call you hero. They call me Engel, l'ange.”

“You can see how they might have gotten that impression.” In an attempt to lighten her, he points out, “Though you did pulverize a church. Kind of muddies the metaphor.”

“I did not like it when you stared,” she says. In an instant, Steve has adverted his eyes, but Diana is already explaining, “It reminded me that I am not...like the rest.” She takes a deep breath. Her air of impending confession compels him to turn to her again. “What I can do,” Diana says, “is not Amazon.”

 _Well, gee whiz, no kidding_ is how Steve wants to reply. But he’s learned by now that sarcasm, like machine gun fire, has little to no effect on Diana.

“From the day Antiope began my training, she accused me of holding back. She told me I shouldn't doubt, that I had more power than I knew.” Diana holds out hands that lifted a tank and examines them as if for a message.

Steve would take them between his own, if he dared. Kiss each fingertip, the center of her palm, and the heart that beats so strong beneath invulnerable skin — a private devotion he keeps off his face. “She knew?” he asks, neutral.

Her nod is measured. “My mother must have as well.” Grief is there. And defiance.

From what he saw and what she's shared, Diana must have had a thousand mothers. Steve can imagine she was a joy and challenge both.

She drops her hands to her lap, wrings them. “To answer your question, I did not know, Steve. It's all so new. Just before you, there was an — an incident. Antiope pushed me to give everything. And it angered me. Because I knew no matter how hard I tried I couldn't.” She hugs her forearms. “It is new and it is not. There has always been something in me that — burns strong. When Antiope came at me, I unleashed it. This light.”

Steve frowns. Seeing is believing, and he saw her strength. _Is there anything else you want to show me?_ To wrap his head around more —

Diana gestures along with her story. “It threw her back. It was such a release, Steve.” Her voice urges him to understand, and this is all so beyond him, but he nods encouragement. “I felt so good. Until I saw that I hurt her.”

“Hey, it was an accident,” he soothes. This part he gets. The guilt that comes of fortune at a price others pay for.

She gives a heart wrenching little shrug. “I tried to speak of it to my mother, but she was mourning. And anguishing over what was to be your fate.”

He already apologized for his part in the general’s death, all those deaths. It doesn’t feel like enough. How could it be?

“I made poor Venelia tell me the whispers.” Diana had spoken of her friend, the second-youngest Amazon, on their journey to London alongside boastful tales of her other Amazonian idols. “My shield-sisters love me, I know. But they are an army because of Antiope. Any one of them would have given her life for their general. But she gave hers for mine.” Pain draws Diana’s face. On the boat, she had expressed something similar. And Steve had given her what space there was to grieve alone.

Awkward, halting, he reaches out. With ease only a loving childhood could impart, Diana moves under his arm to lay her cheek on his chest. The heat she spoke of radiates from her, seeps through his clothes into his skin. He doesn't touch her anywhere she is not touching him. He can't, she's too much, and he's a fool to think he is equipped to comfort her. “If anyone's to blame…” He doesn’t go on after she shakes her head. This isn’t about him.

Diana’s chin presses into him as she speaks. “The two events were so close. The light and your arrival — Maybe what they whispered is true. I did something to disrupt the magic shielding us.” Voice far and deep away, she says, “The gods give no gifts without cost.”

What does Steve understand of the gods? Blood magic and human drama writ large. Lenore, the biggest dreamer of his sisters, understood. She dedicated backyard plays to Dionysus. He carved her wooden swords and wept over the family dog because it made her happy. But when they fought he told her the stories she made up were meaningless trifles.

Diana says, “Antiope set me on this mission.” Resolve banishes grief. “Now that we have found Ares, we cannot fail her.”

“We won’t,” he replies, handling Diana without thought. Shame washes over Steve to think how still he cannot believe. When she came to her epiphany, he was relieved. He needs her on mission — the real mission. More’s the better if she thinks of it as her own.

They sit together in the room’s lived in silence. The tick of the grandfather clock. Footfalls outside the room. Their breathing. Hers is slowing, deepening. His is following suit but with a hitch. The wool of her dress creases and pulls around her ribcage, her kneecaps. His arm weakens on its perch along the back of the sofa.

From where she rests beside the heavy thump of his heart, Diana murmurs, “You have not lost your battle stress.”

Since she can’t see him, Steve lets something of his agony slip over his face. Diana smells like heaven. Feels like heaven against him. And he is in hell knowing he could close her up inside his arms, and she wouldn’t think much of it.

Diana lifts her head. “Steve?” Concerned brown eyes and full, frowning lips consume his vision.

“I’m fi — ” He clears his throat. Pretends to squint across the room at the clock. “Fine.” Then he checks the time on his watch without reading it. “Nothing a nap won’t cure.” He’s overtired is all. His mind is a hundred places at once. He has a mission that demands focus but no action until tomorrow evening. He almost wishes the gala were tonight. 

Diana considers him. “A midday rest.” Mind made up, she arches over him to fluff the pillow at his back. His mouth bumps her shoulder, dry lips on soft skin, and it’s so much so fast, he’s still gaping at her when she’s done settling herself against the other armrest. She slants a brow and shifts her legs. “There’s plenty of room.”

Steve lifts his bare foot to remind her what she’s asking for. When she shrugs, he stretches his legs to the end of the sofa and leans back.

Diana, in repose again, assesses his legs. “So much hair,” she remarks, and he wiggles his furry toes to make her chuckle. 

Plenty of room was an exaggeration. If either of them shifts down any further, their feet will have to go up and over the armrests. They use what room they do have to get comfortable. It’s a farce, almost, considering where they are. Steve is sure Madame Maes has made up their beds. Not that he’s going to be the one to point that out to Diana. The configuration they land on is a complex entanglement.

His calf burns where it touches her ankle, and he is grateful to endure it. Whatever else she is — Amazon, angel, all-too-human without her armor — he’d have to be blind not to see the woman falling asleep with him is a being made of light. “Diana?”

“Mm?”

“I’m sorry.” He chooses his tenses carefully, knowing a man can only change himself so much. “For doubting you.”

Firmly, she replies, “You were my shield-sister today, Steve Trevor.”

He grins at the finest compliment of his career. “Honored.”

Warm toes drum against his shin. “You aren’t the only one who doubted. Your friends are good men.”

Steve offers a generous noise of agreement.

Not long after, Diana’s eyes flutter shut. Her hands are curled under her chin, lips parted. She has been loved before, almost heresy to imagine otherwise. In a tender, sleep-deprived corner of his heart, Steve asks himself if she has ever been worshiped.

The grandfather clock chimes.

When he dreams, it is of Athens after the war. Sunbonnets and tourist maps. Diana’s hand in his as they mount the stairs of the Parthenon. Inside, a goddess waits. Transcendent and wise. Sad, when her gaze falls to their intertwined fingers. _For every gift,_ Athena warns them, _there is a cost._ Without hesitation, Steve gives her his father’s watch.

The grandfather clock chimes again, rousing him.

Unsettled for reasons he can’t recall, his hand goes to his wrist. Still ticking. Diana, who slept through the chimes, has turned her repose into a sprawl. Her arm stretches along her body toward him. He covers the distance between them, his fingers coming to rest in the space between hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Venelia is the blonde Amazon who leads teen!Diana away from her mom and aunt. I was super disappointed she isn't listed as Kasia on imdb, because Kasia is Diana's girlfriend in the Rebirth comics run. But I'm still headcanoning that Diana and Venelia used to have a thing. Venelia is the youngest-looking Amazon I've spotted, so it makes sense to me that she would be charged with sort of being Diana's handmaiden/bodyguard/friend. The way I see it, the Amazons all paused in age when they come to the island. Diana is the only one who ages. So she might physically be older than her friend now. This has nothing to do with the story, but I thought ya'll should have a glimpse the reams of backstory I come up with and don't get to use. It's a sickness.
> 
> Meddling gods is becoming my favorite trope in this fandom, so I had to squeeze a couple in here! And goddesses as a bonus! I'm so hopeful that WW2 explores more female characters. I get why the streamlined it to dudes in WW1, but GIVE ME ALL THE POWERFUL LADIES.
> 
> A million, billion thank yous to my beta, duchamp, without whom you would not be able to tell the subject of any of my sentences!
> 
> A million, billion thank yous, too, to everyone who has kudosed and commented! As you can see from my flailing comments below, I am just blown away by you all.
> 
> THIS IS ALMOST THE END, MY FRIENDS (thanks, the Doors)! Thank you for putting up with my slow-ass writing. I know it can be a drag to wait for a multi-chapter story to come to a close. Just one more chapter left! Here's my forewarning — next update, I'll be changing the rating to M. BECAUSE WE ARE AT VELD, PEOPLE. THE TIME FOR LOVING WITH URGENCY BUT NOT WITH HASTE (thanks, Mumford & Sons) IS UPON US!


	6. Lover

Steve is awake. No adrenaline is required to pump his blood through his veins. No danger at all, yet the hairs on his neck and arms stand at attention. His breath hitches on grins — indulgent grins, teasing grins. Tight, grateful grins he conceals behind a black fur collar.

At the edges of his awareness, Veld is quieting for the night. The revelers drift from the square in pairs and groups, not a man, woman, or child alone tonight. Many stop to pay their respects to the angel swaying in his arms.

A few ask Diana to honor them with a dance, forcing Steve to part with her. As a last hurrah, Sameer insists on teaching Diana a rambunctious foxtrot. Chief and Charlie join Steve at the fountain to watch Sammy lose the lead to Diana’s aggressive spinning. His goodnight is breathless, hers bubbling with laughter. “That was almost a true dance,” she tells Steve, her hand slotting back into his.

Glasses are collected. Chairs are put up. One by one, the windows lending light to the square go dark.

Steve remains transfixed by eyes as encompassing as the night sky. Snow catches on Diana’s heavy lashes, glistens on her soft crown. The early winter cold blustering for attention at his back is nothing to the warmth flowing from her.

None but a few scattered soldiers on patrol are left when their hosts turn in. Madame Maes cups Diana’s cheek and then Steve’s, wishing blessings on them in Flemish and French, before going inside arm-in-arm with her stooped, smiling husband.

The many interruptions have felt like interludes in the same dance. With no one to man the gramophone, the tinny strains of “Sous le ponts de Paris” play on repeat. Steve has told Diana of Paris — the architecture, the museums, the wine — but he’s been fumbling off and on all evening to do justice to why it’s known as the world capital of romance. She smiles at his descriptions whenever he thinks of a new one, but there is a furrow in her brow he would like to smooth away.

“But, Steve, this song is so melancholy,” she tells him. “The poor mother and her children, and the vagabonds.” The sweetness of her concern twinges like a toothache. 

"Well — I mean, it's French." The furrow grows, of course. He tries, "It's a philosophy. You can't appreciate true happiness until you experience real sorrow, is the idea. I guess.” His eyes fall from her searching face, and he loses his words like he always seems to when she asks him about things he's nowhere near qualified to explain. “Love takes on more meaning when, uh…" He pauses to listen to crooning about lovers meeting under a bridge, nothing to offer each other but lilies and a kiss. "Uh, when you have nothing else." He tries to shrug. 

After a moment, Diana says, "I see," in that measured way of hers. She inclines her chin to catch his eye again. “During times of war, a great many must fall in love." Her small smile catches the light in the darkness.

“Not this war.” He chokes on the words, on the sudden intensity of Diana’s stare. That stare of hers that peers down into what’s left of him —

Steve looks away, around. A trio of lanky soldiers patrols the street. He has seen too many boys like these stumble out of brothels, empty wallets and empty eyes. Eyes like the nurse, the last woman he laid down with who wasn’t a mark. She tasted of chalk rations and sharp copper and desperate resignation. Nothing to offer, so they take.

“Forget what I said. Truth is, Paris has gone to hell.” He fails at wry, sounds wrung-out instead.

Diana’s grip loosens in anticipation, Steve thinks, of being pushed away. But he holds fast through the urge. The startling wash of feelings is a hot pain, the burn of the lasso. But he doesn’t need divine magic to cut through the lies he tells himself. This truth he has lived with for years: he is a man hollowed out. And yet Diana is warm, the snow is fresh, and a minute ago he was close to humming. C’est la vie.

Steadied, Steve releases Diana to go to the gramophone. Lifting the needle before the song can play again, he suggests, “We should probably give it a rest, huh?”

Diana has her soul-stare on him still, all cocked head and fixed eyes. He escapes judgment by busying himself hauling the gramophone inside. When he comes out, Diana has her face tipped back to the falling snow. Steve hesitates, realizing what he's done — provided an end point for a night he'd prefer go on and on.

"You are tired," Diana says in a tone he can't help but hear as wistful.

Quick, adamant, he counters, "Not a bit."

Just as they’d seen Monsieur Maes do, she offers a beckoning smile and her elbow. Chuckling, Steve accepts the positioning. His arm in hers, they stroll down the quiet lamp-lit streets of Veld.

Each soldier they pass stands at attention, knob-knees locked tight enough to make Steve want to wince. Their salutes are crisp, their eyes trained on the distance. The affectation is for de engel. She walks among them, but Steve suspects they haven’t fully accepted her as real. The older soldiers, the ones who marched the prisoners forward, left the praise for their savior to the villagers. It seems inevitable that the impossible woman who crossed No Man’s Land armed with a sword and shield will fade to myth, like the Amazons before her. The only proof will be a photograph, and who hasn’t scoffed at a sepia-tone man juggling his own head, a grainy medium and her spirits? 

For Diana’s part, she seems content to ignore the problem of her legacy, choosing instead to focus on the laughter and good-natured ribbing that preceded her entrance. “So cheerful, these boys. And they don’t even know that tomorrow night the war will be over.” 

Steve wants to return her smile. He tries.

Sighing, Diana squeezes his bicep — the dogged pride in him flexes — and says, “I am not a fool, Steve Trevor. Ares brought down the Olympians. I know what we are up against. But we have the element of surprise. Ares forgot the Amazons a long, long time ago. When we arrive at the gala — ”

“The gala isn’t until the evening. Plenty of time to plan tomorrow.” Steve pretends not to notice the side-eye she gives his evasions. How can he explain it to her? Ludendorff may be a man or he may be a god, but modern war is a machine. They need to gather all the intelligence they can get on that factory. And the best way Steve knows how is the last thing he wants Diana to witness.

His long silence prompts her to observe, “You are planning now.”

Even a light accusation chafes. “I am not,” he lies, and it comes so naturally. The smile, too, like a shield going up. The truth is, he would grin day and night for the simple joy of making her roll her eyes at him. But anyone who has seen him at work — the flattery, the manipulation — would be right to question his motives forever after.

A little exasperated with him, Diana says, “So then tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Mind reading isn’t one of your powers?” he teases, praying thanks to any god listening that it doesn’t seem to be. Off her tug on his elbow, he says, “Okay, okay. I’m thinking…” He sighs, casting his eyes upward for inspiration. The clouds have rolled back some, revealing the sliver of a waning moon. Finding the cheer Diana has been angling for, he says, “I’m thinking I need to be thinking more about the here and the now.” He flings his free arm up. “I didn’t even notice there was a moon tonight.”

At his side, Diana says, “It is an auspicious moon,” in a tone that draws his gaze to her, enticing him to ask her why. Her side-swept lashes fall to his mouth, a move he once watched for out of genuine interest rather than professional.

His brain lights up — _signal!_ An increasingly common distraction always punctuated by Sammy’s voice in his head: _Kiss her you fool!_

Steve tunes it out, concentrating on not treading on Diana’s heel. She is escorting him through a narrow maze of identical buildings. He has to check himself at every hairpin turn, let her lead. He recognizes a shift going on below his feet. Late this afternoon, Steve woke up to a bared stretch of thigh. While he struggled to find a decorous way to lower her hem, she failed to suppress a snort and did it herself, no fuss. But when he pulled Diana to him for a dance, awfully close, Steve hadn’t imagined the hitch in her breath. Why the shift? The spy in him craves intel, wants to write up a profile. The better man is relieved. What he doesn’t understand, he can’t exploit.

Diana backtracks a turn or two, he can’t be sure, and a minute later they’ve returned to the square. Evidently proud of her sense of direction, she gives the overturned tank a fond pat. Maybe the villagers will pull it apart for scrap metal and build her a monument. Steve hopes so. If the war ends and he doesn’t, he will need a pilgrimage site, somewhere to offload his devotion when Diana of Themyscira is a memory.

“So, tomorrow the war ends.” Steve’s voice is low out of deference to the silence surrounding them. Out of a weird hope she won’t hear. “What then?”

“Plenty of time to plan tomorrow,” Diana echoes him. Serene, she looks up at the brightest window in the inn. “The firelight looks pleasing. Is that my room?”

Steve can only nod. At least for this, Diana seems content for him to follow etiquette. He gestures for her to go up the inn’s porch first. Inside, she lets him traverse the creaking stairs ahead of her. At the very top, he approaches the master suite. Behind that door is the answer to a question he’s asked before — What does Diana want with him? Right at this moment, Steve thinks any answer might end him. The latch clicks under his hand. 

The room is as pleasing as Diana hoped, all crackling fireplace and dimmed lights. A massively built bed twice the size of the one in his room takes up most of the space. Steve steps back to let Diana cross the threshold. He should have said goodnight outside, would say it now except the hush of the inn has gotten to him. Stepping toward the door, he tells himself it’s better to leave the tension knotting at the base of his throat unspoken. Only he can’t help a parting glance. Diana looks back at him and, with a small toss of her head and a lowering of her gaze, fixes him to the spot.

In that gaze, Steve reads a clear invitation. An answer to a question.

He turns to shut the door. When he turns back, the glimmer of intent in her eyes has not faded to mirage. It is a testament to her power that, for all his doubts, Diana needs neither words nor gestures to compel him to her. Steve crosses the room. His head ducks on the final approach. He’s in her space, closer than dancing. The thought of kissing her — finally, endlessly — overwhelms him. All he can do for the moment is graze his knuckles across the unbelievable softness of her cheek. She draws her hand down his bristly skin, and, suddenly, this is real. 

He cups her cheek. They stroke the shadows they cast over each other’s faces. Her hand slips to the nape of his neck, strong fingers compelling him forward. They are breathing the same air.

Diana is the one to close the distance between them. Her lips press to his, and Steve presses back. Her hand cups his nape, so his slides through the strands of her hair at the root. Plush lips draw him further in. In his younger years, he might have given into the urge to open her up, taste her. Pull her flush against him and explore by touch any part of her he could before the inevitable hand at his chest. Experience has taught him impatience only hastens the agony of refusal. So he mirrors her advances. Tightens his grip on her nape when she does. Shifts closer when she does. And when she licks at the seam of his lips, his mouth falls open for her.

 _Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight_ is the refrain Steve keeps in his head, a necessary check on reality as the rising tide of Diana’s passion sweeps him away. He moves to lock an elbow about her armor-clad waist. His other hand massages her hair, her neck. She is steel and silk over a molten core, and he may be a lousy poet, but he will make up for that with vigor. _Goodnight, goodnight, good_ —

Too soon, Diana’s hand comes to rest at the center of his chest. Steve breaks their kiss with a less-than-dignified sound. He holds onto her, forehead tilted against her chin, to catch up to his heartbeat.

When he can, he lifts his head to find Diana flushed and dreamy and holding on, too. A dazed, proud smile spreads over Steve’s face. He exhales. “Wow.”

“Wow.” Her smile warms him head to toe.

Steve stands before her immobile except for the heavy rise and fall that bobs her stilling hand. He watches her face, praying for another kiss before he’s dismissed.

Diana reaches under the lapels of both his jackets and draws them off his shoulders. They thud to the floor.

In his life, Steve has been accused of being a great many things. _Lucky bastard_ has been leveled at him more times than he can count.

A lighter thud, and Diana’s cloak is pooled at her feet. From her greaves to the leather ends of her skirt to the Aetos Dios — a golden mirror for the sweep of her collarbones, to her crown, every inch of her is perfect. Steve pulls her in to kiss that crown.

His thoughts are a whirl of want and conflict. She is already onto the practicalities of getting his sweater off him. Steve helps her because his neck itches with heat. Her fingers go to his bared throat, and she traces his Adam’s apple with curiosity. His conflict grows. Whatever experience she may have justifying her certainty, Steve is the first man she has ever met.

“Diana, we should — ” He loses his words to a groan when she fastens her mouth around the bulge at his throat and sucks. “Oh, God,” he bites off, and Diana’s appreciative little noise is too much. He steps back, taking her wrists in his hands. Breaking covenant with the hush of the moment, he states, “Diana, we should — we should talk this through.”

The expression she levels at him is almost patronizing. The princess granting an audience to the farm boy. The mild slight stirs him in a way he has never tried to understand.  

Taking a breath, fingers locked on her wrists, Steve says, “Where — where I come from, between a man — ” he draws their hands toward himself and then toward her “ — and a woman, this — ” he lets _this_ stand on its own “ — is complicated.” 

“Because we are not married.” 

“Y-yeah, that and — ” Christ, everything. “Lots of things. Society. Health.”

Diana’s brows come in. “Your healer said you are well.” She was there in his office, sitting behind Etta’s desk trying to pretend she liked tea with milk and sugar, when the doctor had walked Steve out the door pronouncing him, _Fit as a fiddle, clean as a whistle_. The _shockingly_ had been muttered under the doctor’s breath. “I am also well.”

What is Steve worrying over? The long walk down the hall to his pack, he supposes. “There’s...reproductive biology...to consider.”

Diana’s smile tells him she finds his fussing adorable. “I said the moon is auspicious. You might call it without complication.”

He blinks, floored for one because, that settled, she returns to the issue of undressing him. For another, because he needs a moment to accept that, of course, a woman who has honed her body as Diana has, an Amazon, would be attuned to it on another level. But mostly he is floored because, while he spent the evening going ten rounds with his conscience, she had already decided for herself.

Steve lets out a wry laugh, head dropping back.

Diana has made it through the buttons on his shirt, now she’s working on the ones for his long johns. She mutters, “Your people wear too much clothing. Jackets, suspenders, shirts, undershirts — though at least you are fortunate not to be subject to petticoats.”

Steve is still chuckling when Diana reaches the skin she has been in search of. Her lips find the slash on his shoulder first. To imagine she may have remembered that scar from the pools, thought about tasting it — Steve draws a shaky breath.

Diana pulls back, and he takes the opportunity to assess. His shirt has joined the pile on the floor and his long johns are folded over his belt. He follows her eyes down to the muscles bunching over his stomach. Expression studious, Diana reaches out to trace him there and under the curve of his pectorals. The light strokes of her fingertips make him flex hard, less out of vanity and more to keep from shivering. “I have only seen a form like yours in sketches of the great statues.”

He can’t tamp down a smirk. “You’re saying I’m a work of art?”

Finding more scars to trace, she replies, “You have too many imperfections to be art. You are a warrior.”

What could he possibly say to such a compliment? So Steve kisses her. And Diana presses herself to him, the leather of her skirt flattening against the front of his trousers. He roves her armor, feeling for latches and hooks. His arms fall away when she shows him up again, her nimble fingers unhooking his belt. 

A nervous huff of laughter issues from somewhere deep in his fluttering stomach. Needing a moment to remind himself he is a man in his thirties and not a schoolboy, Steve backs away to take care of his boots. Diana does the same for herself. He busies himself collecting their things and moving them to the closet. He hangs her coat and then his jacket, and something about the way they look together reminds him, in the grand scheme of things, how short a time one night is.

“Steve.”

He turns to find Diana barefooted, the incredible length of her legs on display. The muscles of her thighs ripple as she pads over to him. He helps her divest him of his trousers. Her lips part at the absurd tent in his long johns, the head of his cock straining against thin cotton. Diana glances up at his face, then down again. Steve takes over for her, unbuttoning and stripping bare.

He straightens, his cock swaying. Steve has seen the kinds of depictions of the male form Diana mentioned. And he knows the difference an erection makes to his own dimensions. He tries not to preen, he does. Fails miserably, of course.

Diana’s eyebrow lifts in challenge. Her fingers go to the catches Steve found earlier and, in the time it takes him to fill his lungs with a breath to hold, she’s opened the armor from the back. The tiny set of undergarments she wears are made of thin leather dyed the same regal blue as her skirt. After setting her armor to the side, she runs her thumbs beneath the band wound around her chest. “Strophium,” she instructs and removes it. Unbound, her pert breasts lift with her deep breathing. In the low light of the room, her nipples are a prominent, dusky rose. Her thumbs hook into the sides of the bottoms — “Tunica,” she says — and slides them down her hips and to the floor. Tossing her hair, Diana draws herself to her full height, and, Jesus in Heaven, Steve has to lock his knees to keep from dropping on them.

Only her bracers remain. Diana holds one arm out toward him in a gesture that is too fluid not to be ritual. Swallowing his questions, he slides his hand from her bicep to cradle her elbow. She turns the catches up to him. Bowing his head, he kisses the inside of her elbow before opening the bracer and kissing down the length of her pale forearm. For more of the soft, shuddery sounds she makes, he gives the same attention to her other forearm. When he has laid a final kiss onto her wrist, he places her bracers on top of the chest that holds the rest of her armor. She grants his father’s watch a similar tribute. 

They are fully nude now, man and Amazon. Roughly the same height. She is all subtle curves and hard planes. For all that she is a warrior, her skin gleams golden perfection in the firelight.

Nothing between them now, yet they resume their first, chaste touches. Steve’s hands come up to cup her cheeks. Diana holds him at his nape. Their kiss is an oddly tremulous sort of thing. The first time the hard line of her hip brushes the side of his cock, Steve sucks in a gasp that Diana takes advantage of with her tongue. Her fingers find the ridges of his stomach again, skimming toward his thatch of pubic hair. She explores instead the deep lines at his hips, each bold touch just missing his cock.

“You can — ” Steve clears his throat. “Uh, you can tou — touch it if...If you want.” He is grateful for the lighting, which must hide the deepest hues of his flush.

There is sincerity in her eyes when Diana replies, “Thank you.” Her fingertips continue to tease as they travel up the lines of his hips to the highest curve of his ass. She steps around him. “Oh, Steve,” she murmurs, and he realizes she hasn’t seen his back before. Blunt nails find the edges of old wounds. Then her fingers curl into the corded muscles over his shoulder blades. She drops kisses there, the tip of her nose drawing a line down his spine, and nips at the contours above each of his ass cheeks. The shudder that elicits ends any hope he’s had of maintaining a regular breathing pattern. Diana steps behind him, every inch of her smooth body flush against him. Her nipples drag along his back as she leans around. Mouth gone dry, Steve waits it out until Diana’s own curiosity demands to be satisfied. A warm palm closes around his shaft at the base. Steve snaps his teeth shut over a groan that reverberates in his ribs.

She strokes his cock in a loose hold. Lips to his ear, Diana asks, “This is how men pleasure themselves?”

Throat too tight for words, Steve lifts Diana’s wrist to lick her palm before returning it to his shaft. He curls his hand around hers to adjust her grip. A few strokes with her, then she takes over.

His brain is so lit up, he can hardly remember that their roles should be reversed. He is the one with experience in the opposite sex. He is the one with an unflattering conclusion to disprove.

But Diana is a quick and enthusiastic study. Finding the slick pearling at the head of his cock advantageous, she adds a twisting motion of her own invention. The connections Steve has with parts of his body other than his cock weaken. He finds himself leaning on Diana, who holds him upright with her incredible strength. She tips his head to her shoulder. Perhaps gathering evidence for volume thirteen, Diana matches the pace of her strokes to his expressions.

Overwhelming need builds, and Steve knows he won’t last much longer like this. He wants her too much, has from the moment she smiled down on him. Ego almost panicked, he starts, “Diana, I — ” He doesn’t tell her to stop. Even through the fog of embarrassment and pleasure, his strategist's mind recognizes that he is better off playing the long game. Swallowing his pride, he grits out, “Diana, I have to come. I have to.” His balls constrict.

Diana releases him.

The choked, ragged noise that tears from his throat alarms Diana enough that she compels him to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Steve?” Her hands are on his face, and her low voice is shot through with concern. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that would hurt you.”

“No, no.” Steve puffs out a breath, reaching up to grip her elbows. “’M fine. But why — ”

“Well…” If he weren’t aching, he’d be gratified to see Diana abashed for once. “I know about...your biological imperative.” 

“My what?”

Diana gains dignity as she straightens. The undersides of her breasts are at eye level. As much as Steve would like answers, he can’t resist thumbing a curve. “According to Clio,” Diana begins, and he leans forward to mouth pale flesh, to let her know exactly what he thinks of Clio. As he sucks, he rolls the nipple of the opposite breast. “Oh.” 

The extra blood rushing to his cock is not helping. Still, Steve has the wherewithal to prompt, “According to Clio?”

“Ah, Clio — ” Diana leans on his shoulders to grant him better access. “Clio wrote that, during intercourse, the male sex can only reach completion once.” Her heavy sigh ruffles his hair. With regretful sympathy, she finishes, “And sleep will claim him the instant after. 

Steve laughs, though in his mind he is cursing every man who made Clio’s conclusions probable. He tilts his face toward Diana. “That’s not my biological imperative, I promise you.” She looks down on him, carding a cautious hand through his hair. “Where’s your lasso?” he demands, only half-joking. “Clio has it all wrong, Diana. I just need — ” His pride draws the line at begging.

Diana outlines his lips, considering. Then, radiating benevolence, she pronounces, “I believe you, Steve Trevor.” With gentle pressure on the roots of his hair, she impels him onto the bed.

The waterfall of her hair curtains around Steve, limiting his awareness to her mouth on his and her hand returning to his shaft. Her strokes are almost absent as she tests the scrape of his cheek with her lips. Her interest moves to the sharp line of his chin, down his throat. Her tongue on his Adam’s apple, Steve rumbles to please her. Shifting more onto her side, Diana uses her free hand to test the strength of his clavicle, the solidity of his chest. Her fingers circle a nipple. “Is it also untrue that men feel nothing here?” Off his nod, she dips her head to capture it. At the same time, she moves so that when she sits up she is kneeling at his side, expression serene, hair cascading over her breasts. Steve twists a strand around his index finger. Diana is art and warrior. She belongs in the Louvre. 

Diana slides her stroking nearer to the head of his cock. Without warning, her other hand begins massaging his testicles. Steve tenses. Immediately, she gentles, but her look of dealing with something strange and fascinating doesn’t alter. She wets her lips, chews on the bottom one. Then leans down to taste him.

“Di — ” Steve shoots up. Diana mouths over him, running her tongue along the ridge at his head. His eyes roll back, and he’s lost to feeling. His hand settles on her back. Want and memory churn in his stomach. He flexes his left hand, feeling the crumpled up bills he’d hung onto the first time he was in this position. “You don’t have — ”

She looks up at him, not a bit of guile or misfortune lurking in her warm, dark eyes. “You don’t like it?” The kiss she places on him is a sweet contrast to the sour at the back of his throat. Nicotine and must.

Steve swallows down the illicit aftertaste. Diana has nothing to do with the mess mankind has made of desire. “Wha — Whatever you like." 

Diana dips her head again, and Steve grips the sheets and tries to think of nothing but her. Her lips and her tongue and her strength and her smile. Urgency builds. In a warning tone, he says her name once. Twice. She does not let up. He tells himself nothing he could do would degrade Diana, she is beyond scarlet letters and metaphors for violation. But the idea of coming in her mouth is too fraught.

Steve lifts her chin, and Diana honors his unspoken plea. They kiss until he is dizzy with it, until his hips are jerking. He spills hard over her hand, her name on his lips.

Diana holds Steve, soothing him with murmurs and soft kisses on his neck and under his ear that also serve to remind him of more pleasures to come. Steve would swear he invented that move. How disconcerting to be the one cared for, the one told he is beautiful. Warm inside her glow, he rests his head on her chest. His eyes have to be shut before he can tell her, “You are an angel.” He means it more than thanks, more than praise. The meaning behind it is too large to explain, taking up the length and width of his chest.

So he does what any foolish boy does when overwhelmed by feelings. Steve tugs on Diana’s pigtails by pretending to fall asleep. 

“Steve?” Her hand, the one still sticky with him, gives his thigh a gentle pat. Then a less gentle one. He hums air through his nostrils. Low, vehement, Diana mutters, “Suffering Sappho.” The ticking corner of his mouth betrays him. “Steve Trevor,” she exclaims, her hand coming down on his thigh with a resounding smack. 

That sets him off laughing and surging up to roll Diana onto her back. Steve couldn’t be more awake, and he wants to assure her of this. His knees lock her thighs together, his arms cradle her head. Steve swallows her gleeful noises, turns them to moans. In her kindness, she has lifted the edged weight of desperation from him. Gratitude is a freeing thing. Whether Steve has one night with Diana or ten thousand, he’ll be damned if this one isn’t unforgettable for her. Already, he is forming a strategy.

Leaving Diana looking thoroughly kissed, Steve begins by going over to the dressing table where Madame Maes has left a basin of water and a cloth.

Diana arranges herself in a repose, now the true image of Aphrodite. Head cocked, Diana scrutinizes his return. “It is fortunate for your daily routine that it shrinks." 

Snorting in agreement, Steve picks up her elbow so that he may wash her hand. Her eyes continue to roam his body. Put to the lasso, he would have no choice but to admit that he loves the feeling of a woman’s admiring stare. Vanity is a sin on par with mendacity in the Rockwell tradition. Not even for a shot at sainthood would Steve trade the way the heat behind Diana’s eyes sears through him. Finished washing her, he sets aside the cloth.

Steve opens his arms, letting her know everything in view is at her disposal. Voice low and sincere, he says, “What can I do for you, Diana?”

Her eyes darken as he arcs over her, his weight braced on the bed. She reaches up to tap on the divot above his upper lip. “Your mouth is very beautiful.” His lips curve around her finger. The color in her cheeks underscores the urgency in her request: “I would like to feel it.”

“Where?”

She squares her shoulders, a method of composing courage Steve has seen before. “Everywhere.”

Steve complies to the letter. Opening with a reverent kiss on her forehead, he sets about mapping her body and memorizing her responses. Diana tipped her hand by exploring him first. He has a good idea of where she wants his attentions the most — the shell of her ear, the delicate expanse of her forearms, her peaked nipples, her hard, fluttering stomach — and he rewards and teases in equal measure. What he is in search of are those places she never knew could make her heart pick up. He licks into her clavicle, nips the dip in her waist. He lingers at her belly button, fascinated by the reassurance that she is flesh. Perhaps clay is a metaphor that does not translate.

Steve lowers himself to his knees. Diana squirms to follow him to the edge of the bed. She sits up, her feet propped on the high baseboard. His hands putting pressure on either side of her closed thighs, Steve continues his tender assault until she is huffing with impatience, until she is grinding her hips against the mattress for friction. He exerts more pressure to keep her knees tight. Defiant, effortless, she parts them.

The sparse hair above her sex does nothing to obscure her pink, glistening folds from his view. His cock stirs. Steve lifts his eyes to Diana’s face. Her lips are open, her expression dazed. Head bowing, he kisses the inside of one flexed thigh and then the other.

Cutting off a pleased sound, she lifts his chin as he had hers. She strokes his face, need battling compassion behind her eyes. “If it is not the custom in your country…”

It isn't, in point of fact. Even with his penchant for experienced lovers, he has still had to coax and cajole, push desire past the point of humility for this. The naked wish blowing Diana’s pupils wide is as foreign as it is electrifying.

“It's my pleasure,” Steve assures her. From under the sweep of his hair, he watches her follow his movements. His shoulders brush the inside of her knees and her breath catches. Her body strung as a bow, Diana seems more present in this moment than Steve, forever in his head, has been in any moment. He rests his hands on the silk-soft skin inside her thighs to spread her further. She shivers. His lips close over the pearl crowning her sex — by design, the first direct stimulation he has given her — and the shuddered moan that escapes her buzzes his skin. Steve curls his tongue, licking and sucking with a strength meant to shock her body after so much gentle torment.

Letting her catch her breath, Steve flattens his tongue and explores her folds. He circles her entrance. With a hand reaching down to grip his head, Diana lets him know her patience for coy is nearing its limit. He grins, and a tug on his hair tells him she felt that. Steve dips in and out of her entrance, drawing encouraging moans.

His face must be glistening when he looks up from between her sticky thighs, yet he finds not an ounce of shame in her open smile. Instead, there is pride. “You are doing so well,” Diana praises, stroking his hair. Steve has no idea why tender arrogance should be such a turn on. His thighs are tingling. He reckons he could stroke himself to hardness again, but he doesn’t want to divide his attention.

Keeping eye contact, Steve slides one hand from her thigh to her core. Using his thumb, he works her where his mouth has been. Her eyes gloss over, her grip on his hair tightens. Her lips part as he parts her, the length of his middle finger slotting into her taut heat. Diana’s hips buck up, her chin tips down. On the same movement, Steve strokes in with two fingers and returns to mouth over her most sensitive spot. Pain shoots from the roots of his hair, and he half-yelps, half-groans. Apologies breathless, Diana lets go and grips the bed posters. The creak of wood joins her humming moans. Too lost in taste and scent to worry over the furniture or what sounds may carry and how far, Steve builds a rhythm that coaxes Diana’s inner muscles to jump with it.

She falls back onto the bed, writhing. “Steve — Steve.” Diana seems to want something she can only articulate by grinding against his face and hand. Steve changes the angle of his stroking, at last hitting home when he curls his fingers up. She moans something that might well be ancient Greek. Her mysterious, husky commands compelling him, Steve rubs ribbed flesh and sucks her hard bud.

Diana comes in waves that rock her entire body, with an enthusiastic abandon that fills Steve with immeasurable satisfaction.

When he can control his panting, Steve drags himself onto the bed and crawls over Diana’s loose, sprawled limbs to recline next to her. His grin is ear-to-ear. Hers is so bright he can only look at her for so long. He holds up a hand to punctuate a proposed title, “In Response to Clio.”

Diana pulls his wrist down so that he’s arcing over her again. “I suppose it cannot be a true rule if there is not also an exception.” Her bottomless eyes flick to his well-used mouth. His lips almost numb, his jaw aching, Steve wouldn’t decline an invitation to kiss Diana for the world.

Only when his semi-hardness rests on her thigh does Diana let them come up for air. Eyebrows up, she peeks under his arm. Her curiosity is adorable and so damn arousing. He sits back on his knees to give her a better look. Flexing his hands on his thighs, Steve lets Diana’s naked proximity, the lingering scent and taste of her do the work. Her eyes widen as his cock stiffens under her gaze, rising from his thigh. “What an interesting organ,” Diana says in that academic tone he has heard her use to smooth over the want in her voice before. With a fingertip, she traces his full erection from his base along the underside of his upward curve. “I imagine this shape will be especially…” Her finger drops as she gropes for a word. “Compatible.” Her eyes slant away.

Nerves, Steve realizes. His heart gives a funny twist. “Diana, I know you’re curious. But if it’s just that — ” The question he meant to ask was if she was sure. What came out was something rawer.

Diana hears it, shakes her head. “What I felt for you lying on the beach was curiosity.” She leans forward to cup his cheek. “What I feel for you now...” She strokes his face. “You have been my guide, my companion, my shield-sister. I am honored to share this new intimacy with you, Steve Trevor.”

“You honor me.” Can’t she see that? He’s just the lucky bastard who fell out of the sky and landed at her feet.

They kiss and move as one toward the headboard. By consensus, Steve ends up on his back propped by pillows. Diana settles her knees on either side of his thighs and rocks forward, rubbing her swollen sex up the length of his shaft. Sooner than he expected, she rears up to do the same to the tip. Steve grabs hold of Diana’s waist not to direct her, just so he has some part of her to hold onto. She lowers herself over the head of his cock, stopping at the point of stretch.

His hips jerk of their own accord and she lifts, her lips a line. “Sorry, sorry,” Steve pants.

“I want you to stay very still for me,” Diana says, her voice rich with something more than teasing. “Can you do that?” She strokes his lower abdomen. His fingers flex on her waist, but he keeps his hips down.

His reward is Diana lowering over him again, this time with enough pressure that she captures his first inch. The shock of her tight, wet heat is almost too much for Steve, but he does as he is told. Diana takes another inch, mouth rounding. He worries — foolishly, of course — that his grip on her waist is too strong. She captures his retreating hands in hers, threading their fingers together as she sinks around his curve. Her perfect heat radiates through him, rising to his neck and face. He breaks a sweat when she strokes up to his tip. With a square of her hips and a nod toward him, Diana captures his entire length and girth in one smooth motion.

They both still, adjusting, only their chests rising and falling. Diana places their hands where they are joined, expression beatific and marveling. Steve feels a sting behind his eyes.

Then she moves. Up and down. Slow at first. Forward and back. Faster. Rhythmic. Steve hangs onto her hips, not doing more than rocking with her as she tests him. Diana comes down on at a shallower angle. “Oh, Steve,” she gasps. Circling her hips, she finds a new angle she likes even better and builds a gasping rhythm there.

His words are as blurry as his thoughts: “Does that feel good?”

“It’s wonderful.”

“Good. Good. That’s so good,” he babbles. The view is unbelievable. Diana and her widening smile. Diana and her bouncing breasts, her flexing stomach. Her glistening, pink entrance gripping his cock — His balls compress. Need fills him. The need for release, the need to move. Steve screws up his eyes, refusing to end this perfect torment even a moment before Diana is finished with him.

Diana finds a more measured rhythm, taking him deeper. She leans forward, her hands splayed on his chest. Moisture leaks from Steve’s eyes when he opens them. Diana’s hair tumbles around her shoulders, a wild frame for the fierce smile she has for him. “Show me your vigor." 

His orders in, Steve hoists himself up for leverage and thrusts. Diana wraps herself around his torso. Their slick skin gliding together, he bucks into her heat. Diana moaning encouragement against his ear, he climbs to his knees. Grasping her backside, he lifts her up, combining her solid weight and his pistoning thrusts. Again and again. Pleasure threatens to pull him into mindlessness. The scrabble of Diana’s fingers over his back, the spasming of her muscles focus him. He pushes her to the edge.

The names of several gods hum against the skin at his neck. His name replaces them: “Steve Trevor. Steve Trev — Steve, Steve. Ste — ” With a sharp cry, she comes apart on his cock. Impossibly beautiful. The waves of her pleasure wash over him, but he doesn’t find release, even as she milks him in her aftershocks. Diana drapes herself over his shoulder, boneless. Breath bated, Steve waits. 

When she rouses, Diana lavishes attention on him. Kissing his neck, his jaw. She wipes his brow and pushes back his damp hair. Her hands knead the tension in his shoulders. He inclines his forehead against her lips. “You did so well,” she says again. He shudders. She soothes.

Steve gentles her onto the mattress, ready to leave her be if she so much as winces. Her expression is serene. Her legs lock around him. Steve and Diana trace the shadowed light dancing on each other’s faces. They kiss and rock together. He sucks her breaths into him, holds her there. She admires him. Cares for him.

He loves her. 

The self-confession is a release in itself. Steve expresses his tender devotion on Diana’s breasts, her throat, her lips. He pants, “Angel, angel,” into her mouth, and crests inside of her.

Diana welcomes his weight, holding him in the cradle of her hips. Even sated and blurred, Steve can’t stop touching her. He tangles his fingers in her hair and tastes the salt at her neck. She nuzzles into him. Steve wonders if her affection is a simple kindness, if she knows that he loves her. He hopes that he is obvious, pride be damned. He would like to become the kind of man who does not fear the price of sincerity.

Gathering the strength to lift his head, Steve smiles at the closed sweep of Diana’s lashes. He leaves a kiss on Diana’s plush lips, swallowing her mewl of protest as he slides out of her. On unsteady legs, he goes again to the basin to clean himself up. Steve wets a fresh cloth and brings it over.

Diana stretches languidly as he washes her. “I might have liked to do this for you, too,” she points out, sighing when he kisses her belly. 

“You’re tired.” He winks.

She laughs, fingers finding his hair again to tug. “Incorrigible man.”

“Perfect woman.”

“Is that romance?” she asks him, letting him sweep under her knees to lift and tuck her under the sheets. “I feel just as if I’m in Paris. Did you?”

He settles in beside her. "Did I what?"

"Did you feel like you were in Paris on our date."

He draws a very confused blank. "Our date?"

"We danced. We strolled together in the moonlight. Is that not how you described a date?"

"You took me on a date." The thoughtfulness of her guesture — the pure absurdity of how obtuse he can be — makes Steve reach for her.

She swats at him. "All that talk of romance, and you didn't even notice."

Laughing at his own expense, he says, “I never claimed I was good at it. Forgive me. I'm rusty. Please.” He presses his palms together and gives her his best hangdog eyes.

"Well," she melts.

"You want romance?" While Diana finds herself a comfortable spot in his arms, Steve recites the only sonnet he remembers: "‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more — ” The only sonnet he almost remembers “ — temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling' leaves of...June? 'And summer’s — ’ Something. Long days.”

“Steve, that’s dreadful.”

“I didn’t write it.”

Very seriously she says, “I am glad to hear that.”

He laughs, and, God, she feels so good in his arms. Warm and strong and real. She skims her blunt nails in circles over his skin, humming “Sous le ponts de Paris” under her breath. He joins her, and she rests her ear on the center of his chest to listen from there.

“Are you certain Paris has gone to hell? I would like to see it.”

“Yeah. No, I mean, you should. You should see it.” His lips form the word _before_ but he cannot bring himself to voice it.  
  
“I would like to return to London first." 

“First?” Steve tries to match her conversational tone, while out of her view he is overwhelmed at the brink of good fortune.

“Well, we must give our thanks to Sir Patrick in person. And, of course, alleviate Etta’s worry.” Diana’s grip tightens on him in a way he has no choice but to feel as protective. “She told me you were her fifth charge since the war began.”

Steve rolls onto his side, as if he could create a physical barrier between Diana, himself, and the consequences of a war still raging. Not to shield her. Not because he wants to take her and himself away from their duty. This night would not have happened were it not for her victory today, her belief in it for tomorrow. He wants only to preserve the space they have made for themselves tonight. “If you’re going to London and Paris,” he says, “you shouldn’t miss Athens. Or Rome.” St. Petersburg, Metropolis, Kathmandu. He can think of a lifetime’s worth of places to show her.

Propping her head on her hand and smiling, Diana says, “I long to see your world at peace. You’ll be my guide?”

“Yes,” he replies in an instant. The realist in him, the part always ready for his massive lucky streak to end, betrays him by saying, “But I understand if…if you’re anxious to get back home.”

Diana brushes the pale flesh where his watch should be. “Our conception of time is different on Themyscira. My mother may not miss me yet.” Steve thinks they both know that her mother started missing Diana the second she joined him on the boat. There is something more that she’s not saying.

He dips his head to catch her gaze. “When you do decide…let me sail you back.” Before she can react, he says, “I would never presume to stay.”

“Steve — ”

“Listen, I get your concern. I’m a lousy sailor. I can admit that now: I am a lousy sailor.”

“You were bred from corn,” Diana replies, her sweet smile erasing all the frustration she had for him on the boat. “This is not your fault.”

Steve suppresses a smile, pressing on, “It’s something I need to do. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself for wondering if you made it back okay.” He kisses the delicate skin of her wrist. 

Diana sighs. “When I left home, my mother warned me that I may never return. She meant the danger, of course. She was speaking, too, of precedent. The few who have ventured far beyond our shores were lost to us. I fear I might be unable to find my way back.” Though her voice is matter-of-fact, her eyes glimmer.

The risks this woman takes to save a world she is so much better than — they humble Steve. He gathers Diana in his arms, lying down with her. “We’ll find a way,” he tells her. Maps and compasses he can provide. Unwavering conviction, too. It's the least he owes her. “And, in the meantime, we’ll go to London. We’ll see the world.”

“Paris first.”

“Paris first.” Truly, this is a night of miracles. “You know by now, even when the war ends — ” Steve doesn’t want to sell her on something that doesn’t exist. The absence of war is not the same thing as peace. “The world could use your help.”

“Not just mine.” She moves her head from his shoulder to his chest. “There will be much for us to do.”

 _Us. We._  If there is a heaven, an angel has welcomed him into it. There is no religion on earth that can justify such a blessing on one so unworthy. All he can do is his best. “There’s time,” Steve promises. It’s the oldest lie in the book because it’s true right up until it isn’t anymore. There are a lot of ways tomorrow could make a liar out of him. But if he can’t be truthful, at least he is sincere.

“We’ll have the morning to start with,” Diana murmurs, a promise he says he’ll hold her to. Not long after, her eyes flutter closed. “Goodnight, Steve Trevor.”

“Goodnight, angel.” Steve hums their song for her, trailing off when her breathing evens.

He leaves the dim lights, preferring the glow they cast over Diana’s face to darkness. He watches her sleep for a long while. He wonders about her dreams. The slight smile tucked in the corner of her lip. The way she moves with the rise and fall of his chest. The weight of her.

Her weight presses from the inside as well, a kind of hurt. Or maybe Steve has just been a hollow man too long. Anything hurts compared to numbness, even love. Now he has her light, his private devotion. He has hopes for a future he yearns to believe in. He has, at last, a better reason to live than just to fight another day. Knowing Diana has reminded Steve of a simple truth — a thing once hollowed out can be filled again. 

Steve rests his cheek on Diana’s crown, closes his eyes, and sleeps.

* * *

**“Variation on the Word Sleep”**  
Margaret Atwood, 1987

I would like to watch you sleeping,  
which may not happen.  
I would like to watch you,  
sleeping. I would like to sleep  
with you, to enter  
your sleep as its smooth dark wave  
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent  
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves  
with its watery sun & three moons  
towards the cave where you must descend,  
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver  
branch, the small white flower, the one  
word that will protect you from the grief at the center  
of your dream, from the grief  
at the center. I would like to follow  
you up the long stairway  
again & become  
the boat that would row you back  
carefully, a flame  
in two cupped hands  
to where your body lies  
beside me, and you enter  
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air  
that inhabits you for a moment  
only. I would like to be that unnoticed  
& that necessary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait! But this one chapter is only a couple thousand words short of being the length of the entire fic so far, so there’s that. And this fic is COMPLETE, so even better!
> 
> Er, did I say M last chapter? I meant E. Like, over-descriptive E. I figure if they’re only going to get one night (but definitely also the morning) it is imperative that they have all the sex and feel all the feelings. 
> 
> My kink is research and canon-informed characterizations, so here’s some reasoning:
> 
> 1: Diana’s experience or lack thereof. What a conundrum! Obviously, she is 100% canonically bisexual. No questions there. But fanon usually leans one of two ways: Was Diana, total virgin, driven to academic texts because no one on the island would admit their princess has grown into womanhood? Or was Diana, veritable dominatrix, reared on an island of insatiable bondage enthusiasts? I lean more toward Column A (though I would love to read more of Column B). I don’t think Diana is a virgin by any stretch. But I also think her mother is incredibly protective, she was super busy training ten times harder than any Amazon before her, and there is a gap in her life experience compared to others that she probably tried to bridge with academic texts. 
> 
> 2: Plus, I like the idea that Diana’s sexuality is shameless not because she’s gotten the shame kinked out of her but because sex has no connotation of shame at all in her experience. It’s meant to be enjoyed between people who grant each other enthusiastic consent, end of story. You can probably tell from the labored descriptions that I loved writing Diana’s curious encounter with Steve’s, ah, physical differences. 
> 
> 3: The underwear described for Diana is accurate for Ancient Greece and has some hella interesting history behind it. Google “Ancient Greek bikini girls.” And, yes, I’m writing that the Amazons do, by and large, remove hair from their bodies. We see it in the film, plus it’s a confirmed Ancient Greek (and Egyptian and Roman, etc.) thing. Although, I like to believe the Amazons figured out a much better way than actual fire to do away with their hair. Like, yeesh.
> 
> 4: I tried to balance out sex-positive Steve Trevor with historical norms. According to a lot of the articles I read (Google “Sexual mores WWI”), sex was rampant during WWI but the fear of disease, the social backlash, and the grinding numbness of the war really messed with people’s psyches. So, Steve here has some illogical and inconsistent hang-ups, as you do. Finally, if you’re wondering at the lack of described foreskin (if you are, I like your style), there are solid, historical reasons for Steve to be cut. 
> 
> Thank you to my amazing beta, duchamp (who didn’t get a chance to take a crack at the last 1K, since I wanted to get this sucker posted)!
> 
> Thank YOU for reading, kudosing, and commenting! I appreciate it so, so much. Here’s to more wondertrev fic in the future!


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